Cinema’s last great work of neorealism emerged almost 40 years ago: Ermanno Olmi’s L’Albero degli Zoccoli, or The Tree of Wooden Clogs was the Palme d’Or winner at Cannes in 1978 and now gets a cinema re-release. (The Tree of Clogs is probably a simpler, better translation of the title; the wood involved means the sole or lower part of the shoe, going a little over the toe.)
At close to three hours, Olmi’s dark, slow and mysterious masterpiece needs some acclimatisation time; it needs an investment of audience attention so that the emotional connection can be made. For the first act, it is a little opaque and forbidding, but the fairground scene in the middle unlocks the film’s energy, and the final sequences are powerful in ways that would not be possible had we not been immersed in the sombre day-lit world, with every shot composed with painterly care.
The drama is set among the tough lives of Lombardy peasants of the late 19th century and Olmi uses non-professional locals to play the roles. The costumes, the language and locations are so utterly convincing and of their time, it is as if the film had somehow been made in 1898. A priest tells a bewildered peasant couple that their son is a bright lad, that his intelligence is a gift from God and that, instead of helping with farm work, he must be allowed to go to school:: a tough six-kilometre walk there and back in clogs. The father takes this duty humbly and seriously, and it is to have tragic consequences. But the narrative payoff only happens as part of a huge episodic story; its scenes, characters and situations spread across a huge canvas.
A grandfather sneaks out at night to fertilise his tomatoes with chicken dung – a secret process he is very proud of. Other peasants covertly weigh down their crop cartloads with rocks to get more money. The priest tells a careworn widow that a local orphanage can look after her two youngest children to take the pressure off her. A newly married couple travel to Milan by boat so that they can adopt a child and thus get a cash dowry. A drunk peasant at the fair has a Cool Hand Luke-type bet about how many eggs he can eat. And, perhaps most sensationally, a man listening to a rabble-rousing leftist speaker at the fair sees a glistening coin on the ground: he grabs it, and with demented and self-destructive cunning, tries to hide the coin in a horse’s hoof; when the coin inevitably disappears, he loses his mind and screams that the horse is a thief. Olmi coolly juxtaposes this idea of theft – and all its futile rage and self-abasement – with the film’s main event.
The peasant learns his son has a broken clog; in his desperation and poverty, the man illegally chops down a tree on the landlord’s estate to carve out a new one. For father and son, that clog is more tragic even than the bicycle for Antonio and Bruno in Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves – at least they owned that machine, and could restore their rights of possession. The analogy is perhaps more the tree than the clog. It is a mere hunk of wood which the peasant needs, part of the land whose value the peasant has created, and the lack of which the landlord might not even notice. And it is not even for firewood, but as something to be transformed, with resourcefulness and craftsmanship, into the means to give his son a better life.
There is something almost biblical in the starkness and sadness of this situation. The earlier scene, when the priest comes to the widow who is washing clothes in the rain, with a big, black umbrella which he doesn’t think to lend her, is almost unbearably cruel. The film has a tempo as slow as the seasons’ turn, but there is something magnificent in its utter commitment and authenticity.
